By David Lapp, Agricultural Process Engineer

Read time: 5 min

Agricultural Compliance: More reporting getting you down? Why not automate?

As the world is getting more complex, increased reporting is needed for grower payments, grower contracts and even reports for counties and boards.  There are ways you can automate these processes to make your company more efficient and work life easier for everyone. In today’s world, there is an expectation of speed in reporting and the expectation of high leveraging of software to help with this process.   These expectations have really defined our business. Today over 70% of businesses are looking to enhance or improve their ability to generate needed reports in a timely manner. 

More organizations are using different pieces of software and IT tools to generate the reports that they need. They are exporting them into Excel, or some other business intelligence tools to craft their ideal report for compliance or even to help in day-to-day decision making.  Interestingly, to build these specialized reports businesses are hiring more people to help gather pertinent data and put it into a format that is usable. Companies spend countless hours doing this work instead of making sure that data is in the proper format to automatically generate reports in a timely manner. 

Having a software that is in a closed-loop cycle will allow your company the efficiency of immediately pulling the needed information in the format you already require.  A software that allows the flexibility to build the report to your agricultural compliance specifications and to have that ready in the compliance format with just one mouse click.  This software will allow you to reduce the work required by team members that gather data for compliance and reporting. Which will improve their efficiency, freeing up your team to work on your company’s top business goals. It is very important that the software you choose to work with has the ability to automate your data as you’ve been collecting it and present it in a format that works. 

 Automate (Mapping)

What to automate and what not to automate? First, you will have to embrace the closed-loop software. In order to do this you will need to begin by mapping your processes. Examine the workflows that really could benefit from mapping for the quickest ROI. Agricultural compliance processes could be the perfect starting point.  You need to understand the process that it takes to gather the information, audit the information, and compile the information into the proper reporting structure. Mapping processes in detail will allow you to have a better understanding where things can be automated.  For example, you might have 20 people working to capture information during the process and all that has to be updated into a central source of truth (Software), and then you can start your reporting work. If you automate the collection process into a software structure that will allow your information to be completed from field to plate by one source, the required software will need to be fully integrated.

 Workflow

Your priority should be to automate the tasks and items that are routine, for instance, compliance reporting and daily processes. You should not worry about one off tasks.   Once you have things mapped, you should look at the workflow. Examine what steps are needed to complete those tasks, and see if they can be streamlined. This will also help you highlight any gaps that you might have and allow you to address them.  That way when you integrate it into your software, it mirrors the workflow that generates the reports. By following these steps you can reduce “work around” processes and this will create entries into the software that are clean and less prone to errors. Which will ultimately make your compliance reporting less prone to errors. 

 Automating your compliance reporting can not only help improve your focus on your business but more importantly will allow consensus around critical tasks in the compliance process. In other words, you can begin to trust your data. Your goal should be to automate 90% of the processes into the central source software.

 How should we automate for agricultural compliance?

The scariest part of automation when dealing with compliance reporting is team members building specialized items that are directly relevant to your organization. This is why mapping becomes important, so that you know what to automate. 

You are better to take small bites during the examination of the reporting process. In other words, start with the basic information and make sure that the information is coming into your system correctly. An even better plan is if you pull them automatically through sensors. For example, if you have water compliance reporting, allow the connectivity of the data through an API into your software. This will minimize the re-entry of data, and allow you to gain information in a timely manner.

Once you integrate the sources of the data, you can automate the reporting process so that your team only has to verify the information and print the report that has been customized into the needed format. In addition, this connectivity into your software will allow you to attach the costing to your compliance and have a better understanding of your business.

What is the Key?

Several times while writing this blog, I wrote about Software. This is the key to any automation of your compliance reporting, and the easier you can make the process of data collection, the better and more accurate your company will be. The agricultural software you choose needs to be robust enough to handle the gathering, the reconciliation, and the analysis of the data. Therefore, integration of data is imperative.

This Software does not have to break the bank, sometimes it is as simple as connecting the source of your data to your accounting package.